Marketing & Audience Engagement
Journalism is a business. I have had to learn how to effectively brand and market to and for my viewers. You can make a yearbook, but you also have to know how to get people to buy it. You can create newspaper pages, but to print it you have to get sponsors and sell ads. I have come to appreciate the inner workings of the business side of journalism. It has been challenging, but also turned me into an expert saleswoman.
Yearbook Branding & Marketing
The "look" behind the yearbook was very important to me this year. I wanted people to see certain colors or posts on our Instagram and automatically think HHS's yearbook. To do this, I have pushed out periodical posts regarding the yearbook or yearbook-related events with the color palette.
I created this presentation which was pushed out to the whole school in advisory meetings. One of the biggest selling points of this yearbook has been that it is the last year we are all together at one high school. After this year there will be two high schools in Harrisonburg, so this yearbook will be like no other.
We invite our students to share photos and quotes through polls and surveys. When students are interacting with us and feel like they are part of the creation they are more likely to buy the book.
Our staff sends out emails at least twice a month with messages to every student, staff member and parent in the HHS school system to promote the buying of our yearbook.
This year we are on track to sell more books than we ever have before. In this chart you can see we have sold over 50 books more than we did at this time last year. We have purchased extra yearbooks to sell once the physical copies come as we anticipate the demand being even higher.
Advertising
For the past two years on staff, I have led advertising sales. I value every connection I make with a local business. Who knows, my successful pitching skills may end up taking me somewhere in life!
In addition to selling ads, I also design ads for many of the businesses we sell to. I created these two ads purchased by the school system for clubs at the high school.
Analytics:
Social Media
I analyze the post insights of everything we post on social media. I look at a number of things to track audience engagement.
1. Reach: Is this going further than just our followers? If yes, good. If not, why not?
2. Engagement: How many people who see the post actually interact with it? Interaction is key. This means our viewers are reading and absorbing what we report.
Our most viewed and interacted with posts are actually our reels. I have begun transferring our efforts from tiktok to also be posted on reels. It has led us to gain at least 50 new followers.
This is what our professional dashboard looked a month after I took over. The plan my social media managing editor and I came up with prioritized posting every day. This allowed us to track what type of post people engaged with most and produce similar content in the future. We experienced an almost 7,000% increase in engagement.
I now track the professional dashboard at least once a month. This allows me to note what was posted each month and what worked best. Every month we try to brainstorm what more we can do to increase our Instagram engagement.
Analytics:
Website
THIS YEAR
LAST YEAR
I have also worked diligently with my online managing editor to increase our number of published stories and analyze what coverage is people interact with most. In terms of our stories viewed, this year, we had just under 62,000 stories read. Additionally, the average session time was high enough to believe stories are truly being read. In the year before we were only at 30,000 or so. We DOUBLED our views.
Adding some fun
Last year we simply did not sell enough books online. I thought of some creative ideas I could lead my staff through to increase the awareness of the yearbook and sell some more books. I printed out golden tickets and placed them on the bottom of 100 rubber duckies. We hid them around the school. When students found one, they were instructed to bring the duck to the media room for $10 off the yearbook. Not only did it help us sell some books, but it was also incredibly well received by the students. They had so much fun finding the ducks and peeking into the newsroom to see what we were doing.
